"Love Is Patient, Love Is Kind," Love Is Misunderstood

I remember these sappy comics running in my local paper as I was growing up. To an adolescent boy, anyway, they were sappy. My parents loved me, and I loved them. But Love with a capital L with a girl with a capital G? That seemed far away. As I am learning as an adult, that wasn't really love at all.

Foreigner: "In my life there's been heartache and pain
I don't know if I can face it again
Can't stop now, I've traveled so far, to change this lonely life

"I want to know what love is
I want you to show me
I want to feel what love is
I know you can show me...."
http://www.songlyrics.com/foreigner-feat-nate-ruess/i-want-to-know-what-love-is-lyrics/

Alcoholism. "What's love got to do with it?" Tina Turner sang. Plenty.

You can't give what you don't have. Scott Peck, in The Road Less Traveled, claims, "Love is not a feeling...Love is an action, an activity." (http://www.mscottpeck.com/)

Dr. Peck goes on to say, "The common tendency to confuse love with the feeling of love allows people all manner of self-deception. An alcoholic man, whose wife and children are desperately in need of his attention at that very moment, may be sitting in a bar with tears in his eyes, telling the bartender, 'I really love my family....' It is easy and not at all unpleasant to find evidence of love in one's feelings. It may be difficult and painful to search for evidence of love in one's actions."

Take or leave his Cracker-Jack psychology, but Dr. Phil asked a self-consumed mother if she would die for her children. She answered that she would. I'm paraphrasing his response here when I say, "Then why do you keep on drinking and drugging? You won't even get straightened out for your kids, let alone die for them."

Sorry for rambling about love. I hope I left you with a few thoughts to mull over.
It's a tough subject to cover very well in a blog post. I will leave you with Dr. Peck's definition of love:

Love is "the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one's own and another's spiritual growth."